How is Digital Technology Augmenting HR Professionals?

Technology is playing more and more of a part of our lives on a daily basis, more of us have access to a smart phone, a laptop, social media, the internet, have used some form of cloud based technology or indeed have used a form of analytics (without necessarily being aware that we are).

The way organisations conduct business, scale and obtain market share has changed. The Hilton Hotel group have been around since 1919, and in that time have scaled up to 788,864 rooms (as of October 2016) globally; however Airbnb have been around since a meagre 2008 and already have over 2,300,000 rooms available globally (as of December 2016).

Uber have knocked out traditional road transportation options, taxi formations and alliances, through their Uber ride sharing experience (excuse the pun).

This change is happening faster than ever, and those that do not adapt are at serious risk of not existing anymore at all, bar for a few very specialist applications with a diminishing market share opportunity (think: Kodak film) - If only they pressed "go" on the digital camera technology they had in the early 80's!

Traditional companies are starting to realise that they need to be leading with a digital edge, enabling their assets to perform whilst gearing themselves up for the future of what business really looks like, and what shareholders and employees now expect.

These same organisations are also seeing a higher level of executive sponsorship for leading with digital; understanding the advantages of scale, market penetration, improving productivity per resource and reducing bottlenecks just as some core examples...

On top of this, CEO’s have increasingly supported projects including big data elements and analytics. We have seen the shift of what we do with big data through analytics with the move from Descriptive (what has happened?), to Predictive (what could happen?), through to Prescriptive (what should we do?).

I was at the opening keynote at a Gartner Symposium back in 2015 when SVP of Research, Peter Sondergaard said that algorithms are at the centre of business growth; “Algorithms are where the real value lies,”; “Algorithms define action.” “Digital revenues have risen, IT organizations have gone bimodal, and the increased density of connections promises smart agents and algorithms that can do very complex things, including spawning their own, new algorithms and agents.”

Ok… let’s take a pause here before we get caught too much into a rabbit hole, what does this all mean? How can this take away from the fact that we are (mostly) all human and require some degree of human interaction?

This is the future.

Quite simply - Between technological advances such as machine learning, big data, predictive and prescriptive analytics, ambient computing, voice recognition and emotional recognition artificial intelligence - I think you are in for a shock if you can imagine the year 2027, technology is advancing at rates never seen before. It was only in January 2007 that Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, a device and format which has transformed and enriched so many lives.

Michael Porter (so I hear) once said that sustainable competitive advantage is achievable through two key plays; the differentiated play and commoditisation play on the right - most undifferentiated HR personnel will eventually move to the right as technology will assist in making far more accurate decisions based on aggregated data points and combined continuous learning algorithms.

A cluster of computing systems calling upon trillions of data points, utilising some form of quantum computing, will be able to call upon and model accurate outcomes far more accurately, than a single individual with 20 years of experience attempting to neurally connect (or join the dots) of a few million data points, experiences and memories - (remember we talked about how businesses have changed how they operate in the last few years alone?), some HR organisations are already working on future facing projects with this in mind.

Technology can track and measure behaviour over a period of time, test assumptions based on workforce analytics at a rate much faster than humans can. At the moment, those deliverables are very much qualitative in nature, this process is consequently not repeatable due to inherent cognitive dissonance and is hard to scale (which is where the growth engine of businesses are).

In the future (5+ years time), I believe we will be able to do this and quantify the digital behaviours and psychometric data points involved to deal with optimising the subsequent stages of an employee life cycle to drive business outcomes. There will of course, require human input and more importantly, augmentation for this.

HR professionals are already seeing their world change at a rapid rate; there is an expectations that HR is to have a seat at the executive board table, instigating monumental change within their workforce, a driving force of data analytics overlay onto human capital, which will foster incredible improvements in the ways that businesses perform and drive outcomes like never before.

As companies begin to transform the way that they conduct business, professionals must also recognise that there is a future skills gap to productivity; and more importantly, to differentiate leveraging technology assets besides their own broad industry knowledge.

I’d be keen to hear your thoughts!

Shoaib Mughal

Enabling Digital Transformation across the Employee Life Cycle for HR

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this blog post are of my own and not shared with any other entity other than myself.